Mike Celizic

You can hope and you can pray novenas and you can dress up in a grass skirt with a coconut bra and mumble Sanskrit curses while sticking pins in a voodoo doll with an oversized head and wearing a No. 25 Giants jersey, and none of it is going to work. So you may as well resign yourself to the inevitable: Barry Bonds is going to get that record.

He didn’t wait long to slice a home run off the 22 he needs to pass Hank Aaron, going deep vs. the Padres in his second game. He's been plenty frisky for a 42-year-old ballplayer with creaky wheels who spent most of last season on the disabled list. On Opening Day, he singled, stole a base, walked and hit a fly ball to the warning track, which taken together was most of his team’s offense in a 7-0 loss to Jake Peavy and the Padres.

On Wednesday, he made a long run for a leaning catch to end an inning.

You can’t rule out injury, which is a constant threat at his age, especially when he has to play the field. But it’s hard to see anything short of a limb falling off stopping him now. As with all those on their way toward monumental numbers, it’s like watching someone in the last mile of a grueling marathon. He’s aching all over, but he’s well clear of the pack and he’s not stopping now.

If you’re like most fans, that makes you angry, but not nearly as angry as it did a year ago when the storm of outrage over his alleged involvement with BALCO and chemically enhanced muscles was still fresh. When he sat out much of last year and struggled just to get up to the plate on knees that had been battered by multiple surgeries and enthusiastic infections, the edge wore off the anger.

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Now that we have seen that he’s healthy and as spry as a man his age can be, it’s time to let the anger decay into resignation and maybe even come to something of a grudging appreciation for what, come July or August, he’ll probably accomplish.

It is an enormous number, the 756 career home runs that he’s chasing. It doesn’t matter what he took to get within hailing distance of it, it’s still an incredible achievement. Consider all the others in baseball who were taking the same things Bonds was ingesting. None of them are within 150 home runs of him. None of them have played so many seasons with so much blind determination. None have come close.

OK, so the BALCO Basher probably isn’t where he is without artificial help. But he’s still probably at 600 or more just on talent, of which he has always had more than just about anyone you’ve ever seen play. The person who first said records are made to be broken didn’t attach any conditions to the manner in which that could be accomplished. He played by the rules as they were. And if those weren’t the rules as they should have been — as we wish they had been — that’s not his fault.

Bonds could tell you that, which is why he’s arrived at the home stretch. If he had felt the guilt that normal people would feel at what he’s done, he wouldn’t have continued to grind on as he has.

It takes a special person to attack an all-time record, one who is obsessively dedicated to the task. And it should be no surprise that those who preceded him in such quests weren’t always gleaming beacons of human kindness. Just about every one of the very greatest in baseball has had his quirks.